The Creation of Psychopharmacology - Hardcover

Healy, D

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674006194 ISBN 13: 9780674006195

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2002

Synopsis

In this study, David Healy traces the discovery and development of antipsychotic medication. Healy argues that the discovery of chlorpromazine (more generally known as Thorazine) is as significant in the history of medicine as the discovery of penicillin, reminding readers of the worldwide prevalence of insanity within living memory. However, Healy tells not of the triumph of science but of a stream of fruitful accidents, of technological discovery leading neuroscientific research, of fierce professional competition and the backlash of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s. A chemical treatment was developed for one purpose, and as long as some theoretical rationale could be found, doctors administered it to the insane patients in their care to see if it would help. Sometimes it did, dramatically. Why these treatments worked, Healy argues, was, and often still is, a mystery. Nonetheless, such discoveries made and unmade academic reputations and inspired intense politicking for the Nobel Prize. Once pharmaceutical companies recognized the commercial potential of antipsychotic medications, financial as well as clinical pressures drove the development of ever more aggressively marketed medications.

About this title

Review:

"David Healy is a respected historian of psychiatry ...an important and thought-provoking book." -- The Independent, 7 May 2002

"remarkably thorough....Everyone from psychopaths, drug abusers and paedophiles to the shy and unhappy are all now seen as manageable through pills and potions. Healy uncovers the interrelated mix of forces that have driven us to look to drugs as the answer to these psychological and social discomforts." -- The New Scientist, 20 March 2002

About the Author:

David Healy is Reader in Psychological Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine. He is the author of The Antidepressant Era (Harvard).

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0674006194
• ISBN 13: 9780674006195
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416